Robert Perišic’sOur Man in Iraq made it onto the first installment of our Great 2013 Book Preview. A few weeks ago, Perišic sat down for an interview with John Feffer about ongoing changes in the author’s native Croatia, which recently acceded to the EU as its 28th member state.

If you get bored on your daily commute, you might want to look at Derive, an app that generates random routes that give you new perspectives on your city. As The Common founder (and Millions contributor) Jennifer Ackerputs it: “Let the French show you how to walk.”

Roger Boylan at the Boston Review writes about the flourishing posthumous career of Mark Twain: "...more than 5,000 previously unknown letters of Twain’s have surfaced in the last 50 years. This represents an average of two new letters per week, but still only about one-tenth of the 50,000 or so he is believed to have written." And at Slate,Craig Fehrmandiscusses the "brilliant brand management" behind the handling of Twain's autobiography.